My name is Abi and I am the community language ambassador for 2022-2023.

I just graduated from Bachelor in Clinical Science at Macquarie Uni and I'm currently working as a personal assistant to neurosurgeons at Macquarie Neurosurgery.

The benefits of studying a language include being able to associate with people from our community, being able to keep that language constant and pass it through to generations, being able to communicate with my grandparents who don't understand the language of English and find it a struggle to communicate.

And it also helps me in my job with interpreting and being able to express how Tamil people want to express themselves. I most genuinely enjoyed making friends, speaking with teachers, and now I really enjoy being a teacher and leading the kids and teaching them the basics and taking them from start and seeing how they grow and progress in the language.

The most important thing is being able to keep less of a barrier between myself and the people I'm communicating to. And sometimes there's a better way of saying things and it's not expressed the best if I say it in English and they don't understand it. And so keeping that language there and being able express ourselves in the best way that we can is important because then you don't lose the meaning of what you intend to say.

Being bilingual has helped me to think outside the box to solve problems and situations. Definitely being able to just step in and be extroverted because I think learning another language helped me to become more confident in who I was. I definitely say: you're doing well. You have one foot in the door, just keep going and you'll find the rewards of it as time goes on.

I'm Angela Lu and I'm currently a community language ambassador for my local Chinese school, which is the Academy of Chinese Culture. There's so many benefits to learning a community language, but I think the biggest thing is just the community that you get around it. Being surrounded by students, peers and just people from that local community.

One of the key things I enjoyed the most was really about immersing yourself in that culture and being part of those local community events. So, for example, we would have Lunar New Year festivals, we had mid-autumn festivals. In preparation for those, we would prepare and learn a lot of different things to perform. For example, we would do tai chi kung fu, traditional folk dancing. We'll even recite some poetry sometimes and sing some songs. And so that was really fun.

I think the biggest thing for me is really having that connection back to my heritage and culture. I think it's really important because there's so many phrases, traditions, you know, cultural meanings and stuff that are really hard to grasp if you don't actually know the language itself.

It really comes down to our roots, which also is something that connects us when it comes to our family and relatives.

When it comes to travelling, you know, there's a lot of Asian countries that speak Cantonese and Mandarin, and so that's been really helpful. When it comes to like family and relatives, their English hasn't always been the best. So being able to offer help either as a translator or interpreter has helped them a lot.

And on top of that, it's been amazing to also have so much more additional content you can consume because you can now kind of see and learn things in two different languages.

My name is Carmila Chand.

I am an ambassador for the Community Languages Schools Program here in New South Wales and I represent the VHP Sanskrit School of Australia. Right now, I'm a professional. I work for the New South Wales Government in the Department of Planning and Environment as an officer. But in the community language context, I now teach Sanskrit. It allows me to connect deeply to my mother tongue. It also allowed me to connect more deeply with my identity.

Sanskrit is very deeply connected to Hinduism. So it allowed me to be more proud of my Hindu identity and the dharma behind that.

The thing that I enjoyed the most at school was the fact that I was surrounded by people like me. I think in a normal Australian schooling environment, you’re constantly surrounded by different people, which is fantastic. You learn a lot about different people, but very rarely are you in an environment where it's just people like you who you can learn from and share a similar culture with. So it's really nice to just come to school every week and just share that space, that safe space, with people who wanted to learn with you and want to explore more of that culture with you.

Bilingualism has helped me connect much more broadly than an Australian context. I'm able to communicate with people overseas, which is particularly special when relatives like grandparents or extended family don't speak in English. I am also able to pass this down to my children in the future, and the more that I grow up, the more I realise how important it is to maintain that preservation through the generations.

Modern Australia’s so many things. It's made up of a multitude of identities, it’s so multifaceted. And the important thing that we're afforded here in Australia is that we can actually express ourselves and be ourselves and we can be a part of what modern Australia looks like.

So the opportunities that are afforded here through community language learning, for example, and through just wider cultural expression is something that we should definitely own and definitely champion.

My name is Felipe Basioli.

I am a Brazilian Portuguese language speaker and I attended the Association for Brazilian Bilingual Children's Development, which is also known as the ABCD.

Now I'm a full time English teacher and I also teach Portuguese at the Secondary College of Languages, where I'm able to teach Portuguese to language background students.

Innumerable amounts of benefits to speaking and learning and studying my community language background. It's been able to provide me with the opportunity to actually have a connection with my family overseas, which is something that I consider incredibly, unbelievably valuable.

It's also provided me with a variety of opportunities in terms of career where I'm able to actually use my Portuguese that I've learned through the community language schools to improve my career path. To have that opportunity to actually connect with the community and to have my own cultural background expressed and be able to actually celebrate it.

It's also given me the chance to learn other languages and study other languages that are similar to Portuguese. So because I know Portuguese through my community language school, I've been also able to learn Italian and Spanish as a result. So it's helped me out in that respect as well in terms of education.

My advice is to go in and invest your time in doing it and to really push yourself and to engage with it. Sometimes, I know, just from personal experience, it may seem like a bit of a chore to go and study your community language on a day off or in the afternoon after school. But don't look at it as a chore. Look at it as an opportunity for you to engage with your cultural background and to invest in your own future.

My name's Jasmeet Kaur.

I went to School of Community Languages at Seven Hills and I studied Punjabi Continuers there.

I'm currently studying a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Media and Communications at Macquarie University.

Some of the benefits of studying this community language was finding a group of people, a social network that I really, really connected with. Everyone came from the same background that had been, you know, split between two cultures growing up and we all discussed like our main school problems and anything that we wanted to connect on. And it was really fun in that sense as well. And we learned a lot more about ourselves and our culture and our history. We were really able to discover the rich literature that we have, the history that we come from, and just being able to know it in a more deeper aspect.

Most important thing for me is being able to share that with others. So learning it from the older generation and then being able to pass it on that something that's really dear to me and I'm very passionate about it.

Being bilingual has many benefits, not only personally, but academically as well. So on a personal level, I feel like in the four years I studied my language, I grew as a person: not only being able to socialise better not only with my family, but friends as well. And on an academic level, being bilingual opened up many opportunities for me. Being a community language ambassador could be one of them. It also makes you a better candidate for when you go to apply for jobs or anything. Being bilingual is a skill set. Being bilingual, helped me also find my place within two different cultures and two different societies that I was part of, and it forms a great part of my identity as well. Growing up in a society where you come from a different cultural background. When you start off school, sometimes you're not the strongest in English and, you know, Punjabi something that we resonate with, or maybe whatever community language you grew up with.

Hi, my name's Mahisa.

I'm a civil engineer by profession, and I'm here as the ambassador for the Tamil Community Languages.

For me, as a bilingual person, being able to speak in Tamil, my mother tongue, has helped me communicate with the elders in our community as well as reach out and bring awareness to the younger generation. I think mainly just being around all of our friends and family and being able to communicate with everyone in our language as well as learn and study the historical aspects of the language has really enriched like my knowledge of Tamil as well.

I think it's very important that we continue that tradition of being able to speak to our elders and also back home to our relatives in our native tongue.

Being bilingual has helped me with a lot of things, especially travelling back to Sri Lanka, which is my motherland, and being able to speak and communicate with our relatives there has definitely helped with a lot of communication skills as well as being able to read and write in Tamil has helped advance our knowledge in the language.

I would definitely tell my the future generation that don't think of it as a chore and going to Tamil school and learning Tamil will definitely benefit you in the future.

Being able to speak, learn, read and write has helped me so much and it will definitely help you to.

My name is Siobhan Costello.

I am Australian born, Australian Japanese halfie. I have recently finished my first bachelor degree and soon to study masters of teaching.

As a young Australian Japanese kid who only really studied English most of my life and then having to study Japanese only 3 hours every single week was a bit difficult.

And so to show my younger – I only can think of the word in Japanese - kohai, which is junior, my juniors at my school and even my students that it is possible to graduate your community language school after eighteen years of studying there and to then pursue a career in teaching and still being involved in the community, I think that's something I'm really proud of.

Without my career choice and going back to my community language school early on in my university years, I don't think I would have realised my passion in teaching.

The convenience of being able to convey my thoughts and my like expressions and any small little detail like and get through clearly to the students without any issue. I feel like that's something I'm so proud of saying that I'm able to do now, 22 years later.

Definitely to not give up. I did have a phase where I was so close to giving up, but because of my community, my friends, my family. They were the ones that pushed me forward to keep pursuing Japanese studies throughout high school. Do it through my HSC years and it's definitely different memories that you experienced in the primary high school setting and even getting to experience that life in Japan and going to school setting there.

You get to really try out different things because you know a language you can speak to a different community, learn their culture and become more passionate in things, and you get to see the world a whole lot more differently.

Being able to communicate in Japanese to my family overseas in Japan, and talking both in English and Japanese in public settings here in Australia and Japan, you can get away with a lot of things with different languages.